This paper proposes a solution for the automatic detection and tracking of human motion in image sequences. Due to the complexity of the human body and its motion, automatic detection of 3D human motion remains an open, and important, problem. Existing approaches for automatic detection and tracking focus on 2D cues and typically exploit object appearance (color distribution, shape) or knowledge of a static background. In contrast, we exploit 2D optical flow information which provides rich descriptive cues, while being independent of object and background appearance. To represent the optical flow patterns of people from arbitrary viewpoints, we develop a novel representation of human motion using low-dimensional spatio-temporal models that are learned using motion capture data of human subjects. In addition to human motion (the foreground) we probabilistically model the motion of generic scenes (the background); these statistical models are defined as Gibbsian fields specified from the first-order derivatives of motion observations. Detection and tracking are posed in a principled Bayesian framework which involves the computation of a posterior probability distribution over the model parameters (i.e., the location and the type of the human motion) given a sequence of optical flow observations. Particle filtering is used to represent and predict this non-Gaussian posterior distribution over time. The model parameters of samples from this distribution are related to the pose parameters of a 3D articulated model (e.g. the approximate joint angles and movement direction). Thus the approach proves suitable for initializing more complex probabilistic models of human motion. As shown by experiments on real image sequences, our method is able to detect and track people under different viewpoints with complex backgrounds.

We describe a 2.5D layered representation for visual motion analysis. The representation provides a global interpretation of image motion in terms of several spatially localized foreground regions along with a background region. Each of these regions comprises a parametric shape model and a parametric motion model. The representation also contains depth ordering so visibility and occlusion are rightly included in the estimation of the model parameters. Finally, because the number of objects, their positions, shapes and sizes, and their relative depths are all unknown, initial models are drawn from a proposal distribution, and then compared using a penalized likelihood criterion. This allows us to automatically initialize new models, and to compare different depth orderings.

This paper addresses the problem of probabilistically modeling 3D human motion for synthesis and tracking. Given the high dimensional nature of human motion, learning an explicit probabilistic model from available training data is currently impractical. Instead we exploit methods from texture synthesis that treat images as representing an implicit empirical distribution. These methods replace the problem of representing the probability of a texture pattern with that of searching the training data for similar instances of that pattern. We extend this idea to temporal data representing 3D human motion with a large database of example motions. To make the method useful in practice, we must address the problem of efficient search in a large training set; efficiency is particularly important for tracking. Towards that end, we learn a low dimensional linear model of human motion that is used to structure the example motion database into a binary tree. An approximate probabilistic tree search method exploits the coefficients of this low-dimensional representation and runs in sub-linear time. This probabilistic tree search returns a particular sample human motion with probability approximating the true distribution of human motions in the database. This sampling method is suitable for use with particle filtering techniques and is applied to articulated 3D tracking of humans within a Bayesian framework. Successful tracking results are presented, along with examples of synthesizing human motion using the model.

Edges are viewed as statistical outliers with respect to local image gradient magnitudes. Within local image regions we compute a robust statistical measure of the gradient variation and use this in an anisotropic diffusion framework to determine a spatially varying "edge-stopping" parameter σ. We show how to determine this parameter for two edge-stopping functions described in the literature (Perona-Malik and the Tukey biweight). Smoothing of the image is related the local texture and in regions of low texture, small gradient values may be treated as edges whereas in regions of high texture, large gradient magnitudes are necessary before an edge is preserved. Intuitively these results have similarities with human perceptual phenomena such as masking and "popout". Results are shown on a variety of standard images.

In this paper we consider a class of human activities—atomic activities—which can be represented as a set of measurements over a finite temporal window (e.g., the motion of human body parts during a walking cycle) and which has a relatively small space of variations in performance. A new approach for modeling and recognition of atomic activities that employs principal component analysis and analytical global transformations is proposed. The modeling of sets of exemplar instances of activities that are similar in duration and involve similar body part motions is achieved by parameterizing their representation using principal component analysis. The recognition of variants of modeled activities is achieved by searching the space of admissible parameterized transformations that these activities can undergo. This formulation iteratively refines the recognition of the class to which the observed activity belongs and the transformation parameters that relate it to the model in its class. We provide several experiments on recognition of articulated and deformable human motions from image motion parameters.

Most approaches for estimating optical flow assume that, within a finite image region, only a single motion is present. This single motion assumption is violated in common situations involving transparency, depth discontinuities, independently moving objects, shadows, and specular reflections. To robustly estimate optical flow, the single motion assumption must be relaxed. This work describes a framework based on robust estimation that addresses violations of the brightness constancy and spatial smoothness assumptions caused by multiple motions. We show how the robust estimation framework can be applied to standard formulations of the optical flow problem thus reducing their sensitivity to violations of their underlying assumptions. The approach has been applied to three standard techniques for recovering optical flow: area-based regression, correlation, and regularization with motion discontinuities. This work focuses on the recovery of multiple parametric motion models within a region as well as the recovery of piecewise-smooth flow fields and provides examples with natural and synthetic image sequences.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems